The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life By Erving Goffman Essay

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Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born, extremely influential, sociologist and one of the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences. Goffman is probably best-known for his study of symbolic interactionism. This theory was explained through a famous dramaturgical analysis, from his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman is also known for his research on total institution shown in his work, Asylums (1961). A major area of Goffman’s study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, moving away from macro sociological studies such as that of Marx and many other significant sociologists. What is mainly looked at, is the reactions to industrialisation and the explaining …show more content…

Goffman does not ignore this, but is more concerned with the idea of social life being structured or patterned in terms of meaning.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a book that was published in 1959. In it, Goffman creates a theatrical metaphor in order to portray the importance of human and social action and interaction. Goffman describes this as the dramaturgical blueprint of social life. According to Goffman, social interaction may be likened to a theatre and people in everyday life are likened to actors on a stage, each playing their distinctive roles. The audience is made up of additional individuals who observe the role-playing and react to the performances. The main concepts that make up the Dramaturgical framework are the performance, referring to all the activity of an individual. These performances deliver impressions to others and …show more content…

It was never meant to be taken as a literal account of how an individual view themselves. It is put forward to offer a ‘general theory of face-to-face interaction, a theory that could be used to interpret any social exchange’ . The theory itself consists of both individual actions and structures which partly determine these meanings. In a society where individualism is becoming ever more prevalent, it is necessary for sociologists to study this, as the idea of what constitutes an individual is changing. Through Goffman’s theory of self, the individual was seen as making conscious and unconscious choices on how to project the image they want. This, it can be argued is the real value of Goffman to sociological

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